Baby Doe Tabor: Matchless Silver Queen

Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt was born in 1854 in Wisconsin. She moved west, married a man named Harvey Doe, and came to be called “Baby” by the miners in Central City, Colorado. After attracting the attention of wealthy “Silver King” Horace Tabor of Leadville, she began a very public affair with Tabor ending with marriage in a private ceremony in 1882.

A lavish lifestyle followed but ended abruptly after fifteen years with loss of the Tabor fortune in the Silver Crash and Horace's death in 1899. Baby Doe spent the last thirty-five years of her life in a small cabin outside the Matchless Mine in Leadville.

“Lohse has written a succinct and enjoyable history of what is perhaps the greatest rags-to-riches-to-rags story in the American West—how Baby Doe Tabor became the Matchless Silver Queen.“
—Robert E. Hartzell, Executive Director, National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum